High temperature Hall effect sensors based

on heterojunctions
Cite as: J. Appl. Phys. 99, 114510 (2006); https://doi.org/10.1063/1.2201339
Submitted: 10 November 2005 . Accepted: 14 March 2006 . Published Online: 06 June 2006

Hai Lu, Peter Sandvik, Alexei Vertiatchikh, Jesse Tucker, and Ahmed Elasser

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J. Appl. Phys. 99, 114510 (2006); https://doi.org/10.1063/1.2201339 99, 114510

© 2006 American Institute of Physics.

 JOURNAL OF APPLIED PHYSICS 99, 114510 共2006兲

High temperature Hall effect sensors based on AlGaN / GaN heterojunctions

Hai Lu,a兲 Peter Sandvik, Alexei Vertiatchikh, Jesse Tucker, and Ahmed Elasser
Micro and Nano-Structures Technologies, General Electric Global Research Center,
Niskayuna, New York 12309
共Received 10 November 2005; accepted 14 March 2006; published online 6 June 2006兲
We report on AlGaN / GaN heterojunction structures for use in Hall effect sensors working over a
wide range of temperatures. Room temperature current-related magnetic sensitivity of 55 V / AT at
a sheet resistance below 300 ⍀ / sq and very low temperature cross sensitivity of 103 ppm/ ° C up to
300 ° C were obtained for a square-shaped Hall effect sensor. The active layer of the Hall effect
sensor is the two-dimensional electron gas formed at the Al0.3Ga0.7N and GaN heterointerface
caused by the gradient in the total polarization between the AlGaN barrier and the GaN buffer layer,
which results in the positive polarization induced interface charge attracting free electrons. The
temperature-dependent transport properties of the heterojunction were analyzed by Hall
measurement. The drop of its electron mobility from room temperature to 300 ° C is mainly due to
the enhanced polar optical scattering, while the very stable sheet carrier density contributes to the
excellent temperature cross sensitivity of the Hall effect sensor. © 2006 American Institute of
Physics. 关DOI: 10.1063/1.2201339兴

I. INTRODUCTION sic carrier concentration and high breakdown voltage, which

Hall effect sensors are widely used as proximity
switches, position sensors, velocity sensors, and in current
sensing applications. Although it is one of the best known
solid-state devices, the Hall effect sensor is still attracting
considerable attention.1 One of the areas of interest is to
enable Hall effect sensors to function at high temperatures
共⬎250 ° C兲 and other harsh environmental conditions; those
operating conditions are of prime importance for a wide
range of industrial and military applications. Conventional
Hall effect sensors are mainly based on silicon or compound
semiconductors, such as InAs, InSb, and GaAs. The advan-
tage of using silicon as the active layer of a Hall effect sensor
is its easy integration with signal-conditioning circuits and
its low cost.2,3 InAs, InSb, GaAs, and related heterojunctions
typically have very high electron mobilities. As a result, Hall
effect sensors based on these materials can have fairly high
magnetic field sensitivity at low temperature up to room
temperature.4–6 However, due to the narrow band gap of
these materials, thermal activation of intrinsic carriers can
significantly change their transport properties at higher tem-
perature 共⬎200 ° C兲. The resulting large temperature cross
sensitivity makes these sensors unusable at temperatures
above approximately 200 ° C. By heavily doping the active
layer, the extrinsic state of these semiconductors may be
maintained to somewhat elevated temperatures; however,
due to a sacrifice in carrier mobility, this approach is quite
limited.7 Currently most Hall effect sensors on the market
have a peak specified operation temperature of 200 ° C or
lower.
AlGaN / GaN heterostructures have been a subject of in-
tense investigation recently due to their high potential to be
used for high temperature, high power rf electronics.8–10 The
wide band gap of GaN-related materials leads to low intrin-
a兲
Electronic mail: luh@research.ge.com
is a requirement for extremely high microwave or millimeter
wave power applications. Further contributing to the out-
standing performance of AlGaN / GaN-based heterojunction
transistors is their ability to form a two-dimensional electron
gas 共2DEG兲 with sheet carrier densities of 1 ⫻ 1013 cm−2 or
higher near the interface without intentional doping. This is
well in excess of those achievable in most other III-V mate-
rial systems. It has been demonstrated previously that the
spontaneous and piezoelectric polarizations play an impor-
tant role on the 2DEG formation and confinement at the
AlGaN / GaN interface.11 In this paper, we report that an
AlGaN / GaN heterojunction is an excellent structure for use
in Hall effect sensors employed over a wide temperature
range. Stable operation up to 300 ° C is demonstrated with
good magnetic field linearity and very low thermal drift. In
the next two sections, we will report on device fabrication,
testing method, and measurement results. Ways to further
improve the magnetic sensitivity of AlGaN / GaN-based Hall
effect sensors will also be discussed.
II. DEVICE FABRICATION AND TESTING METHOD
The AlGaN / GaN heterojunction structures were grown
by metal organic chemical vapor deposition on sapphire sub-
strates. The epitaxial layer consisted of a 2 ␮m undoped
GaN buffer layer and a 25 nm Al0.3Ga0.7N barrier layer. A
sheet resistance of 250 ⍀ / sq was obtained from Leighton
measurement at room temperature. A capacitance voltage
profile showed a 2DEG at the junction interface and no re-
sidual charge was found in the AlGaN barrier or the GaN/
sapphire interface. Square-shaped Hall devices were defined
by optical photolithography followed by mesa etching using
an inductively coupled plasma reactive ion etching system in
a chlorine-based plasma. As shown in Fig. 1, the size of the
active region is 300⫻ 300 ␮m2. Ti/ Al/ Mo/ Au Ohmic con-
tacts were deposited by electron beam evaporation and an-

0021-8979/2006/99共11兲/114510/4/$23.00 99, 114510-1 © 2006 American Institute of Physics

114510-2 Lu et al. J. Appl. Phys. 99, 114510 共2006兲

FIG. 1. 共Color online兲 Schematic of the Al0.3Ga0.7N / GaN heterojunction-

based Hall effect sensor mounted on a heater chip inside a chip carrier.

nealed at 800 ° C for 1 min. The processed wafer was diced

into 3 ⫻ 3 mm2 chips. Each chip was mounted on top of a
resistive heater element using high temperature epoxy. The
combined assembly was mounted onto a chip carrier for test-
ing. The heater element was used to raise and maintain the
surface temperature of the Hall sensor and was calibrated
using a high-precision infrared camera.
The absolute sensitivity of a Hall effect sensor is its
output Hall voltage 共VH兲 divided by the normal component
of the magnetic induction 共B⬜兲:
FIG. 2. Temperature dependence of output Hall voltage as a function of
magnetic induction. The inset of this figure shows the enlarged portion of
the original output curves.
and will decrease as temperature rises, presenting an unde-
sirable result. On the other hand, for wide band gap 共WBG兲
semiconductor-based Hall effect sensors, a major advantage

冏 冏
is their very low intrinsic carrier concentration at high tem-
VH perature. As can be seen from Eq. 共2兲, if a WBG-based Hall
SA = . 共1兲
B⬜ effect sensor is biased by a current source, ideally its mag-
netic sensitivity could be invariant after the semiconductor
The ratio of the absolute sensitivity of a transducer to an
enters exhaustion region. Therefore, current-biasing mode is
applied device bias yields a relative sensitivity. For a square-
chosen for the AlGaN / GaN high temperature Hall sensor in
shaped Hall effect sensor built using a strongly extrinsic
this study.
semiconductor, and depending on the biasing mode, current-
Direct sensor testing shows that the offset voltage of the
related sensitivity and voltage-related sensitivity are ex-
AlGaN / GaN Hall effect sensor is less than 10% of its Hall
pressed as follows:1

冏 冏
voltage. To further reduce the offset voltage, the spinning-
SA 1 VH rH 1 current technique was applied.1 This technique switches the
SI = = = GH ⬇ , 共2兲 biasing and the sensing contacts alternatively. Averaging the
I I B⬜ qNS qNS
two Hall signals together cancels the offset voltage. The

SV =
SA
V
=冏 冏
1 VH
V B⬜
w
= ␮H GH ⬇ ␮H ,
l
共3兲
where GH is the geometrical correction factor, which is be-
tween 0.6 and 1 for a square-shaped Hall sensor; rH is the
Hall factor of the majority carriers, which is around 1; Ns is
the sheet carrier density of the active layer; ␮H is the Hall
mobility of the majority carriers; and w / l is the width-to-
length ratio of a rectangular Hall sensor, which is 1 in this
case. These formulas show that a low sheet carrier density
and high Hall mobility are key to a high sensitivity Hall
sensor.
Another key parameter in describing the performance of
Hall effect sensors is cross sensitivity, which is the undesir-
able sensitivity to other environmental variables, such as
temperature or pressure. The temperature cross sensitivity of
magnetic sensitivity of a Hall effect sensor is TC= 共1 / S兲
⫻共⳵S / ⳵T兲, where S is the current-related or voltage-related
sensitivity and T is the temperature. Due to various carrier
scattering mechanisms, the carrier mobility of a semiconduc-
tor may vary strongly over a wide temperature range. It will
eventually drop quickly at high temperatures after phonon
scattering dominates. Thus, if a high temperature Hall effect
sensor is biased by a voltage source, based on Eq. 共3兲, its
magnetic sensitivity is also a strong function of temperature
spinning-current technique is particularly efficient when ap-
plied to a Hall sensor device with a shape that is invariant
under a rotation of ␲ / 2.
III. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
The output Hall voltage of the AlGaN / GaN Hall effect
sensor is shown in Fig. 2 as a function of temperature and
magnetic induction. These curves have good linearity and are
very close to one another from room temperature up to
300 ° C. The inset of Fig. 2 shows an enlargement of these
curves. With increasing temperature, no degradation of func-
tionality of the sensor is observed. In fact, the Hall voltage is
larger at higher temperatures, which is shown by the larger
slope at higher temperatures. As the measurements suggest,
300 ° C is not a limiting temperature for operation.
Figure 3 shows the corresponding current-related mag-
netic sensitivity as a function of temperatures. The magnetic
induction and biasing current were fixed at 1.7 kG and
3 mA, respectively. The current-related magnetic sensitivity
increases from approximately 54.5 to 56.5 V / AT between
RT and 300 ° C. Using a linear regression fitting technique,
the temperature coefficient of magnetic sensitivity is calcu-
114510-3 Lu et al.
FIG. 3. Current-related magnetic sensitivity of the Al0.3Ga0.7N / GaN Hall
effect sensor as a function of temperature. During the measurements, the
applied magnetic field is 1.7 kG while the biasing current is 3 mA.
lated to be 103 ppm/ ° C. This is an excellent value even for
conventional Hall effect sensors made for low temperature
operation.
Since both GH and rH in Eq. 共2兲 do not depend on tem-
perature in strongly degenerate structures, the weak tempera-
ture dependence of magnetic sensitivity is mainly due to the
unique transport properties of the AlGaN / GaN heterojunc-
tion. In order to further illuminate the sensing mechanism,
the temperature dependence of Hall mobility and sheet car-
rier density of the sensor was measured using the Van der
Pauw method. As shown in Fig. 4, with increasing tempera-
ture from RT to 300 ° C, the Hall mobility and sheet carrier
density decrease monotonically. At RT, the Hall mobility of
the AlGaN / GaN heterojunction is close to 2200 cm2 / V s
with a sheet carrier density of 1.15⫻ 1013 cm−2. This mobil-
ity is close to the theoretical limit of electron mobility as
predicted in this material system, which reveals the excellent
crystalline quality of the epistructure.12,14 The inset of Fig. 4
shows that the Hall mobility decreases as T共K兲−␣ with
␣ = 1.8. Many theoretical studies have been conducted to
analyze electron scattering from phonons, ionized impurities,
line dislocations, and interface roughness at the AlGaN / GaN
interface. These mechanisms are responsible for mobility
FIG. 4. Hall mobility and sheet carrier density of the Al0.3Ga0.7N / GaN
heterojunction as a function of temperature. The inset of this figure shows
the temperature dependence of Hall mobility in log-log scale as well as the
linear fitting curve.
J. Appl. Phys. 99, 114510 共2006兲
FIG. 5. Sheet resistance of the Al0.3Ga0.7N / GaN heterojunction as a func-
tion of temperature. Part of the data points is fitted linearly.
limitations in a 2DEG. The result of ␣ = 1.8 indicates that in
the temperature range investigated, polar optical phonon
scattering is the dominant scattering mechanism for the
Al0.3Ga0.7N / GaN heterojunction.13,14
The weak temperature dependence of current-related
magnetic sensitivity is mainly due to the very stable 2DEG
density at the Al0.3Ga0.7N / GaN heterointerface. As shown in
Fig. 4, as temperature increases from RT to 300 ° C, the sheet
carrier density decreases by about 2%. This also explains
why SI increases by a small amount as the temperature rises
in Fig. 3. The high-density 2DEG at the AlGaN / GaN inter-
face is caused by the gradient of spontaneous and piezoelec-
tric polarizations at the heterointerface, which results in the
positive polarization induced interface charge attracting free
electrons. This is different from the conventional 2DEG
formed in As- or P-based heterostructures in which inten-
tional doping in barrier layers is needed. The small differ-
ence of temperature-dependent thermal expansion coeffi-
cients and elastic constants of GaN and AlGaN should be
considered here, which could be a dominant mechanism to
explain the small change of sheet carrier density. In addition,
although the spontaneous polarization in group-III nitrides is
very large, the pyroelectric coefficients, describing the
change of the spontaneous polarization with temperature, are
measured to be unexpectedly small. For example,
dPSP共AlN兲 / dT = 7.5 ␮C ° C−1 m−2 at room temperature has
been reported.15,16 Thus, the change of 2DEG density con-
tributed by the change of gradient in spontaneous polariza-
tions at the heterointerface is expected to be also very small
as a function of temperature. To date, there is no report on
the temperature dependence of piezoelectric polarization of
group-III nitrides. Since it is expected to be very small as in
spontaneous polarization, its contribution to the change of
2DEG density with increasing temperature should be small
as well. To further understand the very stable 2DEG inside
the AlGaN / GaN triangle quantum well, it is also important
to understand the changes in electron occupations in the sub-
band structure with increasing temperature. Theoretical cal-
culations have been performed in the literature for a 2DEG
density of 9 ⫻ 1012 cm−2 in an Al0.15Ga0.85N / GaN hetero-
junction. As the temperature increases, the electron occupa-
tion ratio for the ground state energy level 共E0兲 is found to
114510-4 Lu et al.
FIG. 6. The output Hall voltage as a function of magnetic induction mea-
sured with different biasing currents. The inset of this figure shows the Hall
voltage as a function of biasing current under a fixed magnetic induction of
1.7 kG.
decrease, whereas the occupation ratios for the excited en-
ergy levels 共E1 and E2兲 are found to increase. However, even
at 400 ° C, 77% of the 2DEG still lies in the ground state.17
Therefore, in the case of the Al0.3Ga0.7N / GaN heterojunction
used in this study, sufficient 2DEG confinement should be
maintained at high temperature.
Figure 5 shows the corresponding sheet resistance of the
Al0.3Ga0.7N / GaN heterojunction as a function of tempera-
ture. It is interesting to observe that between 150 and
300 ° C, the sheet resistance increases nearly linearly with
temperature with a temperature coefficient of 5540 ppm/ ° C.
This behavior should correlate with the temperature depen-
dence of Hall mobility and sheet carrier density in the same
temperature range. The change in sheet resistance will lead
to a variation in input resistance with temperature, which is
not desired in some practical applications. However, at the
same time, such effect can be utilized to form a temperature
sensor in the same Hall device.18 Temperature sensing is es-
pecially important in high temperature circuits where certain
corrections often have to be made to compensate for the
thermal drift.
Figure 6 shows the Hall voltage as a function of the
applied magnetic induction with different bias currents. No
degradation of magnetic sensitivity at large bias current is
observed compared to low bias current. This is due to the
very stable 2DEG density at AlGaN / GaN heterointerface
upon heating effect. Since the output Hall voltage is propor-
tional to the magnitude of bias current 共inset of Fig. 6兲, a
straightforward way to enhance output voltage is to reason-
ably increase the bias current. High temperature Hall effect
sensors are intended to be used initially in niche applications
and in harsh environments where voltage supplies and power
consumption are of less importance.
J. Appl. Phys. 99, 114510 共2006兲
IV. SUMMARY
Unintentionally doped AlGaN / GaN heterojunction ap-
pears to be a promising material for magnetic sensor devel-
opment for high temperature applications. An ultralow
thermal drift, a reasonable magnetic sensitivity, and a good
linearity versus magnetic field and bias current have been
obtained. The competitive performance of the
AlGaN / GaN-based Hall effect sensor is due to the unique
transport properties of its 2DEG which is induced by the
polarization effects at the interface.
The objective of this work is to evaluate group-III nitride
materials for high temperature Hall effect sensor applica-
tions. The structure studied here may be further optimized in
order to improve the sensor performance. The current-related
magnetic sensitivity is about 55 V / AT at room temperature
for an Al0.3Ga0.7N / GaN heterojunction. The 2DEG density
in this structure was around 1.1⫻ 1013 cm−2 and was origi-
nally optimized for high electron mobility transistor 共HEMT兲
applications. Based on Eq. 共2兲, current-related magnetic sen-
sitivity is inversely proportional to sheet carrier density.
Decreasing 2DEG density down to the 1012 cm−2 range may
enhance the magnetic sensitivity up to ten times. The 2DEG
density may be controlled by adjusting the Al content or the
thickness of the AlGaN barrier layer. A more complicated
heterojunction structure such as 共Al, In, Ga兲N / 共In, Ga兲
N / GaN may also be employed based on the concept of band
gap engineering and strain engineering.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The authors would like to thank David Shaddock for
technical assistance and Vinayak Tilak for fruitful discus-
sions. This work is supported by the MNST New Ideas As-
sessed Funding at GE Global Research Center.
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